CASE 19 Pearya (Ellesmere Island)
Report of the project:
On the 26th of June 2017, the CASE 19 expedition of the BGR started in the Canadian Arctic. Until early September, 47 scientists, wildlife monitors and logistic staff from 20 institutions from 7 countries were involved in the fieldwork of CASE 19 at the northernmost tip of Ellesmere Island. Major goal of the expedition was the examination of the geology and structural history of the continental margin of North America. Since the beginning of the terrestrial Arctic research of BGR in 1992, CASE 19 was the largest geoscientific land expedition ever.
Working area CASE 19 (red boxes)
Source: BGR
The multi-disciplinary geoscientific research during the CASE 19 expedition included several scientific tasks. Besides the examination of the structure, architecture and the geological history of the margin of the North American continental plate, the scientists investigated the drift of the Arctic plates during the last 800 million years to understand and reconstruct the formation and opening of the Arctic Ocean we know today. In this context, the phase in the early Paleogene (55–35 million years ago) is of great importance, when the former large continent Laurasia broke apart, which led to the present plate tectonic distributions of continents and oceans in the Arctic. At the same time, the worldwide climate on Earth was much warmer than today, and the polar ice caps or large glaciers did not exist on Earth. Subtropical climate, proved by results of preceding CASE-expeditions on the New Siberian Islands, on Ellesmere island and the Mackenzie Delta, as well as by the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) on the Lomonossov Ridge in the center of the Arctic Ocean.
Helicopter leaving the basecamp with scientists
Source: BGR
The transport of personnel, equipment, fuel and food between the base camp at 82° north and Resolute Bay 950 km farther south was organized with the aid of Twin Otter and DC3 airplanes. For the geological investigation of the 10,000 square kilometres large study area, two helicopters were used to transport the the scientists to their target areas in the field every day.
The CASE 19 expedition was realized in close cooperation with the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC). The participants of CASE 19 came from geological surveys, university institutions and museums from Canada, Denmark, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, USA and Germany.